


Of Ash and Dying Stars

by Goshawkling



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goshawkling/pseuds/Goshawkling
Summary: For Visas, sleep meant dreams.  Or visions.  She wasn’t quite sure what the difference was.  They tasted of the Force.  As if the Force didn’t want her to forget where she came from, or who she was.
Relationships: Visas Marr/Darth Nihilus
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Of Ash and Dying Stars

In the cold depths of space, time flew by as on a sameness wheel, without changes or cycles or seasons. However, sometimes, when the lights on the Ebon Hawk were dimmed as if to simulate nighttime, when even the loudest of the crew were tired enough to try to find rest, Visas found herself finally able to sleep.

It was not restful sleep.

For her, sleep meant dreams. Or visions. She wasn’t quite sure what the difference was. They tasted of the Force. As if the Force didn’t want her to forget where she came from, or who she was.

It was a familiar dream, almost always the same, as she stood on a crest of a hill that looked over the quaking world that was once something-like Katarr, as the whole planet died one-by-one around her. Below was a field of flowers that she felt through the force.. fading, fading, to quieter pastel hues of nothing until finally they were the gray of ash, blowing away, dead, in the wind.

Yet still, she was. Burning bright with her own color. A vivid splash of red in a field of gray. A bright spot in the Force.

Katarr died quietly.

The planet’s death throws were marked by the howling of an angry wind nipping at her clothes, blowing her over, overpowering her. There were no screams, no cries for help, just silent acceptance. She fell, first to her knees, then to her belly, the pain from all that barely registering, and she felt her very being disintegrating into the mist.

_I am the Force, and the force is with me_. She breathed in, breathed out, dying quietly, making peace. _There is no death_. It became harder to breathe. One cannot exist without the Force. Death was a mercy. Every rise and fall of her chest was agony. What was the point of continuing on, alone, in so much pain? So she stopped.

Even in her dreams she twisted, writhing. She allowed herself to die. She gave in to it.

But she was not alone.

Her resurrection was uncalled for, unasked for, and unpleasant, like being zapped in the chest with a tempest-volt of lightning, shocking her into spasms. Her arms moved without her permission as her grasped whatever she could, trying to find purchase.

She found some, and clung. Robes, ragged and warm and black as the night-between-the-stars tore between her fingertips. She buried her face into the nook between The-Thing-That-Would-Be-Her-Master’s shoulder and collarbone, pulling at him, breathing it all in, somehow, impossibly alive. He reeked of smoke and fire and death and ash, yet somehow burning impossibly bright with borrowed light, stolen life. Visas used all her energy to turn her head and shriek. It all felt so wrong and yet so important, like the Force was pulling her in a direction she had to go. She was such a small thing, just a child in a much larger universe.

_There is no death_.

He ignored her, somehow impossibly gentle as he cradled her like an infant and made his way back towards his ship. She found blackness and silence again, fading back into unconsciousness. And even then, she dreamed.

A dream within a dream. Another dying planet lay sprawled out below her, burning and lifeless and littered with corpses.

_Malachor V_.

His voice, his real voice, the way it had been before the Force was ripped away, whispered softly in her head, close and intimate and so quiet she stilled her breath to listen.

_Malachor. This is where it ends. And it begins. See._

She could taste blood-that-was-not-hers in her mouth, could feel the burns on her brows and lips and hands, fingers twisted and maimed and broken. There was pain inside her that was unfathomable, lost and unquenchable, that howled up at the great vast silence of the stars looking for answers through borrowed eyes that were not hers. For the first time she saw colors, physical colors, sight without the Force and its absence was terrible, overwhelming and profound.

( _yet the stars above Malachor were beautiful in their own terrible way. A sky painted in a palette of reds and blue, endless and empty and eternal and perfect all at the same time_ )

She saw that there existed life without the Force, and it was terrible in its wrongness and agony. She felt the wound in the universe, and gazed into it.

_Help_ , she breathed out, in an old voice, a lost voice, that again was not hers; as she breathed air that was not hers, trying to take in this vision and understand the broken mess that was Malachor, the broken mess that her Master had been birthed from. Anger of betrayal burned like a physical brand within her. She felt the shock of the gravity wave, the impossibility of survival. The trust in the Force that was stripped away in one away, echoing, tearing instant. And yet somehow, she had survived.

_Here we are, still standing_.

They were the Same, through a broken mirror.

She could feel his mind, his empty, broken force-presence right there, satiated with the force-food of a million different souls, and barriers down. Without the Constant Craving he could come closer to being the man he used to be, though it was just a tease, a respite. He could reach out to her through the force without just mindlessly consuming her like a sand-serpent eating its own tail, only because he was full of the remains of Katarr. It was all such a jumble. A terrible intimacy that would only last the night. The brokenness in him was too much for her to fix, if she even could find it in her to forgive such monstrosities.

The food that was Katarr would not last long.

She mourned for Malachor as she mourned for her own planet.

We are the remains, the lone survivors.

She felt her own fear welling up into him, his hunger and suffering and lost-broken misery welling up into her, some kind of terrible perfect intimacy and desire to be her, to have her, to have her breathe her life and power and presence into him. She did not understand it, did not want to understand it, but found it impossible to look away.

It had been so intimate. In the misty altered-reality of dreams, she thought, maybe, somehow, they had fucked then, the night they had formed the bond…. She had vague memories of it, of her hands cupped on the back of his head, reaching underneath his cowl and they pressed against each other like lovers…… though she was honestly not sure if they had been something that truly happened or some kind of altered, grotesque memory that sprung up like a wrongness from the back of her mind. She guessed probably the latter.

Things had changed so much since then…That had been before the rush of satisfaction that was Katarr had rushed away, and Nihilus put his walls back up, became again Nihilus the starvling, Nihilus the ghost, Nihilus the dying star… It was a slow death that lasted years, that he seemed unable to save himself from, to separate himself from his wound, as the Exile had.

Some souls were irredeemable.

It was a difficult peace to make.

Visas woke up with the taste of ash in her mouth, coughing, suddenly aware and uncomfortable in her surroundings. She was worried that the Exile.. or even worse, the old witch, would sense her dreams, would find her broken, would cast her out.

She was like a moon too far away from her sun, caught in the orbit of another, lost spinning, into the void.

There would be answers somewhere.

She stilled herself, and vowed to ask the Exile about Malachor. Perhaps answers about what happened there would help guide her to some closure.

_There is no emotion, there is peace._

She bowed her head under her veil, reached out into the Force, and listened to the songs the stars sang to each other.


End file.
